Update 9:45AM: The Air Quality Advisory and Burning Restrictions have now ended.

Today, Saturday and Sunday will be warm, will have periods of rain and possibly some wind too. Thankfully though after a rainy Friday, most of the rain for the weekend looks like it might come in the overnight hours and leave us mostly dry for daytime Saturday and Sunday. Fingers crossed.

Check out the “Kitchen Sink” page.

Make sure you click on and bookmark the “Full Conditions and Almanac” link added to the menu along the top. I’ll be adding to the page over time and reorganizing some of the data there to make it easier to read and to group the values a bit. It’s coming along nicely.

2014 marches to warmest year on record.

Even though El Niño hasn’t materialized and despite the local cold snaps… the world is on track to have its warmest year since humanity started dumping CO2 into the atmosphere.

The NOAA have released their monthly global climate report for October 2014. It says:

With records dating back to 1880, the global temperature averaged across the world’s land and ocean surfaces for October 2014 was the highest on record for the month, at 0.74°C (1.33°F) above the 20th century average. This also marks the third consecutive month and fifth of the past six with a record high global temperature for its respective month (July was fourth highest).

The world temperature anomaly map. The difference from normal 20th century average temperatures was higher in nearly every region except eastern Euopre and Russia.

Important takeaways from this report:

a) El Niño warms huge parts of the Pacific Ocean and strong ones have contributed to record warm years in the past (like 1998, which many skeptics like to hold up as the start of the “end” of warming). October 2014 saw the warmest ocean temperatures for the month on record, and there was no El Niño.

b) As we all know, water warms slower and holds heat longer than air. So warming oceans have the potential to disrupt and/or change weather patterns significantly over longer periods of time. They represent a huge store of energy for the worlds weather patterns to use.

c) November and December would have to be colder than average for the world to avoid being the #1 hottest year in NOAAs records. As the image below shows, there hasn’t been a below average October since the 1970s and November and December are no different.

The last below average October globally was 1976! The year before I was born.

So…. don’t let anyone tell you global warming has stopped, slowed down, or is happening somewhere else. The trend is obvious. The records are clear.

So what do we do?

This is a problem that we can all do our small part to help with, but it is still a national and global problem that demands national and global solutions.

Science is not partisan. The Climate does not care if you are right wing or left wing, Green or Conservative, NDP or BC Liberal. As we are seeing in Buffalo, the weather that this change in climate is forcing upon us does not distinguish between rich or poor, developed or undeveloped.

We need to demand our senior governments take the issue seriously. Only provincial, national, and global governing bodies can put in the incentives and dis-incentives our economies need to be able to shift away from CO2 pollution. These represent gigantic job-creating opportunities as we rebuild our electrical infrastructure, build out our renewable energy infrastructure and modify our transportation infrastructure.

What is really going to cause people to sit up and take notice and demand change?